It's 4.45pm and the Hunslet Club in south Leeds is so busy that I have to queue for quite some time to get in. Toddlers are racing around, parents drink coffee and kids in, variously, ballet outfits, gym kits and disco gear jostle to get past me.

It's a typical Tuesday evening at the club, which has been running since 1940 in various guises, though never quite as actively as this. As enthusiastic chief executive Dennis Robbins, who has been with the club since 1970 when he was 10-year-old, explains, "we now have a membership of 2,200, up from 200 when I joined".

Emily, 11, comes here three times a week to do cheerleading, hip-hop and youth club. She says she comes because, "The staff are really kind and funny." Allanah, nine, adds: "I always go in the computer room and music room. There is also a hall where we play sports games, a beauty room and a chilling room. It's ace!"

The Hunslet Club is just one member of youth club charity Ambition, which has just changed its name from Clubs For Young People in a rebrand and refocus. Helen Marshall, Ambition's chief executive, says the rebrand was important to raise the profile of clubs such as Hunslet: "The youth sector is a crowded sector but we are the UK's leading youth club charity and we need to better advocate on behalf of our members."

It's doing this with a new three-year strategic plan and the introduction of a new quality mark that all its 3,500 members will have access to (conditionally by 2014). It's also, thanks to a recent conference, Say Something, in which its young members helped shape the three-year plan, suggesting more business enterprise schemes, something the organisation now plans to promote.

In the case of Hunslet it's not hard to see why the trumpet doesn't get blown often. There's simply no time. The energetic Robbins is far too busy teaching boxercise, ruffling small people's hair and joining in with a hip-hop dance class to worry about proving the club's worth. Nonetheless, its worth is evident. There's an eye-watering timetable of clubs and classes, ranging from toddler ballet to City & Guilds courses in construction.

Serving the whole of south Leeds, the club is funded by Education Leeds to train local Neets (those not in education, employment, or training) and it works with 220 referred kids across the region. However, at the other end of the scale some of the provision is so good that kids travel from as far as York to use its boxing facilities.

The facilities are good, says Robbins, because there's no point in them not being. "When we had no money, the roof would leak and we'd close the rooms, then people would leave. Young people are materialistic. They want good equipment and why shouldn't they?"

Clubs at Hunslet cost just £1.50 a pop, hardly a route to riches. So the facilities, 40 staff members and training are funded in an ingenious way. On weekends, the club doubles as a fully-licenced wedding venue and it also hires rooms out to private clubs through a private company, Hunslet Leisure Limited, which then gifts the profits back to the club.

Ambition works with clubs like Hunslet to provide training and support as well as funding (which in turn comes from business funding, charitable donations and smaller private donations). And the work it does is vital, says Marshall.

"As much as 40% of voluntary youth clubs are in the most deprived areas of the UK," she says. "Attendance is voluntary and there's a much more different dynamic than that in formal education. However, the relationship between a youth club and a school means that they can help each other."

To that end, some of Ambition's clubs go into schools and provide programmes as part of the curriculum. It's also working with the Department of Education for ways to help youth clubs to get disengaged children re-engaged and a pilot mental health project with Young Devon to prevent mental health issues from escalating.

Steve Crawley, youth programme development manager for Youth Action Wiltshire, agrees that youth clubs play a vital role that schools can't always provide. Youth Action Wiltshire has 75 affiliated youth clubs and Crawley's team, which works closely with the county's integrated youth service, has recently been overseeing a project, Sowing Seeds, to turn scrubland into youth club allotments.

Conservation projects like this are a great way to involve young people, says Crawley, "They can see a difference in the work they do. They learn a lot of transferable skills and they learn how to work with each other. And also they're using basic English and maths to measure out and mark."

He mentions a kid he's been working with who didn't finish year 11 at school but through a project like this went on to complete an outward bound course at college: "Sometimes we lose the idea that youth clubs can be a great avenue for learning."

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